Perot Takes Debate Fight to Court

Four years ago, Ross Perot energized millions of potential voters with his self-financed $60-million independent presidential campaign. His outsider message and his pledge to bring business-style solutions to government clicked with voters who feared for their own jobs and were fed up with the inability of Washington to control the soaring federal debt.

Today, Perot’s lawyers will be in court for a hearing on his demand to be allowed into this year’s presidential debates. If he is allowed in, the core message voters will hear is the same:

The nation faces fiscal calamity because Washington won’t rein in spending, Perot claims, the country is hemorrhaging jobs because of “stupid one-sided” trade agreements and government is saddling future generations with debt.

But Perot’s message of impending fiscal disaster seems not to be registering with a 1996 electorate that is far more upbeat than in 1992; his promise of grand solutions supported by few details has lost its allure; and Perot’s manipulation of his own party to make sure he was its nominee has disenchanted many former supporters.

Perot argues that the Republicans and Democrats will not fix the nation’s problems “because the two parties are bought and paid for by the special interests.”

And he blames the parties and those same special interests for keeping him mired in single digits in the polls.

“If you’re not in those debates, you can’t be competitive,” Perot said recently on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “If you can’t get on television in your campaign, you can’t be competitive.”

Legal experts give Perot relatively little chance of success in his lawsuit. But Perot may have better luck with his complaint to the Federal Communications Commission aimed at forcing the networks to sell him more and better advertising time, said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, executive director of the Media Access Project, a public interest law firm.

Federal law requires the networks to provide “reasonable” amounts of time to candidates, and the FCC “has consistently construed the statute as giving a tremendous amount of sway to candidates,” Schwartzman said.

If Perot does get into the debates--or if the networks sell him more time--what will voters hear?

Perot still uses charts and figures to support his argument that the nation faces fiscal disaster if it does not balance the budget and overhaul Social Security, Medicare and other social programs.

A new wrinkle this year is the mention in virtually every speech of an 11-month-old child identified as Amanda Parkins. Perot uses her as an example to drive home the cost of deficit spending to future generations. Perot claims that by the time Amanda is grown, she will have to pay 82 cents out every dollar of income in taxes to support the government.

The figure, Perot says, is on page 25 of the federal budget book released by the Clinton administration two years ago. But two prominent economists say the figure bears no relevance to what Perot is claiming.

The number is based on a controversial theory for calculating the impact of the debt on future generations that includes a “doomsday” scenario of what would be needed to eliminate the entire $5 trillion in accumulated national debt, said Barry Bosworth, economist at the Brookings Institution. “This number is absurd.”

“I don’t think there’s much point to that,” said Herbert Stein of the American Enterprise Institute.

As in the past, Perot in continuing to stress the evils of what he considers to be bad trade agreements. But in contrast with his last campaign, Perot is now also putting considerable emphasis on overhauling the tax system, eliminating the Internal Revenue Service “as we know it.”

Bad trade agreements have cost the United States 20 million jobs since 1980 and have eroded the standard of living of middle-class Americans and weakened the tax base, Perot says. Others dispute his claims--particularly about the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. “NAFTA is clearly benefiting California’s economy,” said Julie Meier Wright, the state Trade and Commerce secretary.

Perot’s approach to the tax system is classic Perot: In clipped, staccato style, he outlines not a solution, but a process for reaching a solution. Perot says he would assemble all the best minds in the country to study the tax system from every aspect and to look at all the alternatives.

The proposed solutions would be sent to computer science departments in leading universities for analysis. Finally, they would be submitted to a referendum of American voters to let “the people choose the tax system they think makes the most sense,” Perot says.

But Perot’s credibility, even among potentially loyal backers, has been damaged by the way he has dealt with the new political party he created and paid for.

Insisting that “it’s not about me,” Perot feigned a desire for someone else to lead the Reform Party into the 1996 election and on to the future. Former Colorado Gov. Richard D. Lamm rose to the bait and declared he would run.

The very next night, Perot announced his own candidacy.

Perot refused to debate Lamm--something he now says is not at all in conflict with his own protest of being left out of the fall debates.

But to Reform Party stalwarts like Mark Sturdevant of La Habra, all of this smacked too much of the same politics-as-usual that Perot condemned in the past. Sturdevant, who had been a Lamm supporter, resigned as vice chairman of the California Reform Party.

Sal Russo, a Republican consultant who worked for Perot for six weeks in 1992 before the campaign team was fired, said Perot’s no-nonsense talk “getting under the hood” of government and “cleaning out the barn” sounded good back in 1992.

“But now we find out there ain’t anything there,” Russo said. “He doesn’t have any better ideas of what to do than he did four years ago.”